John Updike Quotes

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.

Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

Women are an alien race set down among us.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.

There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.